“I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax;
it is melted within my breast;
my strength is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to my jaws;
you lay me in the dust of death.”
-Psalm 22:14-15
I have attempted to start this blog post several times, every time, sitting down at my laptop, touching my fingers to the keys and attempting to write something that resembles authenticity.
Every time I have stumbled, insanely tempted to coat my words with poetic prettiness, to “tone down” how I’m feeling. or shroud it in veil of strange ambiguity.
But every time, I choked, and stopped before I even started.
I knew it was wrong, I knew deep down it wouldn’t help me, and certainly it wouldn’t help others, which is one of the primary intentions I have in writing on this (sometimes very messy) blog of mine.
This might be one of the most difficult, most vulnerable, and most open things I might ever have to record on this blog.
So, here it goes.
I am hurting, friends.
I ache, brothers and sisters.
I feel broken.
I have cried more in the last six months (and even more in the last month) than I have in perhaps my entire life.
I feel, lately, as though I am stuck in a hole in the ground that is exact at my eye level. I can see what's going on above ground, and witness the lives and the blessings of those around me, but I can’t get out. The hole is exactly too narrow and tall for me to hoist my body out.
Like all people, I have certainly experienced difficult seasons of life. I have felt hurt, betrayal, worry, and I have felt the brush of death, like most have at one time or another.
But those past times were different from the gut-wrenching, heart-aching, joyless, deep hurt that I have felt deep in my soul lately.
I have known what it is to have your heart physically hurt, and not just in the metaphorical sense.
There have been moments when I wonder if I will ever be the same. I wonder if the circumstances of my life and the pain that I am now enduring will change me completely. And I fear that change, I fear who I might become.
This deep, deep pain I feel now doesn’t just stay contained within my own soul. So many people in my life, people I love, people I trust, people I see often, people whose stories and hearts I know intimately, and even people who I don’t know so well, are hurting intensely.
My spirit groans and churns within me for the people I know and the people I love who are hurting.
The very depths of my soul are struggling, sometimes even painfully so, in prayer. Never before had I found myself literally on my knees, grappling with God for the lives of others and my own.
Yet here I find myself, awake and weeping in the wee hours of the morning.
I cry, and find myself consumed by a crushing darkness. I cry out, to God, begging Him to listen and answer and fill and heal.
I once memorized Psalm twenty-two for a Bible recitation event at my school. At the time, I read the words in tone of feigned pain and desperation. I thought understood the Psalm then, but the truth is, I had no idea what it felt to be the author of that passage.
I am poured out like water.
All my bones are out of joint.
My heart is melted in my breast like wax.
It is in this shadowy night of my soul, in this season of awful desperation, that I have yet realized one thing.
I am nothing, not without Him.
My lamentations have pulled me to the depths of my own sinfulness. My pain is like a mirror, it has reflected the ugliness of my own human self. I am simultaneously repulsed and frightened by what I have seen, and it was in that moment of introspection that I cried out to God.
My cry was weak and, yet, frantic.
And I knew He is drawing me to with a closer intimacy than I have ever felt before. The words of Psalm thirty-four, “the Lord is close to the brokenhearted” have been thrust upon with a greater understanding than I thought was possible.
There are times still when I feel so far from Him, when I wonder whether He actually listens to the weak, groaned prayers of someone like me. I wonder if He cares, and whether it even matters in the grand scheme of humanity and eternity if I suffer and endure.
And I still struggle.
I cannot say that the pain has left, that I have excited this time of great sorrow. But know He is working within me, growing me and changing me and revealing truth to me. He is whispering to my broken heart, and one day I shall know fully, even as I am fully know.
Until then, brothers and sisters and friends, know that you don’t weep alone.
In the hour of the dark night which seems the longest, you aren’t alone. God is with you, and others struggle and lament with you.
It is okay to feel pain. Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t.
It is okay to doubt.
It is okay to cry, to be sad, to not be filled with joy at all times. It is ok to be heartbroken, crushed in spirit, downcast.
And most of all, it is okay to not know why you suffer. It’s okay to be angry, to not understand, to pound the ground, begging for relief.
For as you now suffer, do not forget the terrible suffering of Christ on the cross.
Remember that He groaned and cried out as well.
Do not forget the words of the Son of God as He was hung up to die.
“Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?”
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
But, in your pain, do not forget the glory of the resurrection either. Do not forget the vision of glory that is yet to come.
Do not lose sight of the fullness of the Gospel, that as He died to save the world, so He also was raised to life.
To the glory.
In Daylight and In Darkness,
Zoe
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